I did not see this coming (Sarcastic)

Now that Blizzard is making the heirlooms truly xrealms, is it not odd, that suddenly they have the tech to do it In-Game, via the mail tool?

Honestly, I think they could have done it for a LONG time, but it just has been too good source of income to them.

"In the latest 5.4.2 PTR build, we are testing the new ability to mail account-bound items to other characters on your account that may be on different servers. Notably, this should allow you to move heirlooms between servers, in advance of our planned Warlords changes that will make them fully account-wide.

Sending this sort of mail should work like any cross-server communication: You send the item to "Playername-Servername" and it should otherwise work like regular mail. Note that you can only send account-bound items, and not other items or gold.

Example: I have a character, Thrall, on the Benedictus server. I want to send my heirloom mace to my alt, Durotan, on the Lycanthoth server. I'd log in as Thrall, and attach the mace to a mail addressed to "Durotan-Lycanthoth" and hit send."

If it wás a good source of income, why would they abandon that source of income. Nothing has changed there.

While I believe you are right about your claim that they did have the tech before... (or could have gotten it easily), I doubt it has anything to do with a source of income. Because they could still have that source of income if they did not do this.

Now that Blizzard is making the heirlooms truly xrealms, is it not odd, that suddenly they have the tech to do it In-Game, via the mail tool?

Honestly, I think they could have done it for a LONG time, but it just has been too good source of income to them.

"In the latest 5.4.2 PTR build, we are testing the new ability to mail account-bound items to other characters on your account that may be on different servers. Notably, this should allow you to move heirlooms between servers, in advance of our planned Warlords changes that will make them fully account-wide.

Sending this sort of mail should work like any cross-server communication: You send the item to "Playername-Servername" and it should otherwise work like regular mail. Note that you can only send account-bound items, and not other items or gold.

Example: I have a character, Thrall, on the Benedictus server. I want to send my heirloom mace to my alt, Durotan, on the Lycanthoth server. I'd log in as Thrall, and attach the mace to a mail addressed to "Durotan-Lycanthoth" and hit send."

As much as I love rampant distrust of Blizzard, gonna side with them this time. Could they have done it a while ago? Yes, but it would have taken a ton of work. Now it is easier because cross realm and connected realms have laid most of the groundwork.

While I believe you are right about your claim that they did have the tech before... (or could have gotten it easily), I doubt it has anything to do with a source of income. Because they could still have that source of income if they did not do this.

I doubt that they had it. Easily created I can't honestly say. If it is, clearly not a high priority feature for MoP. You can't build out every feature you want to.

I'm happy to see this. I'm glad to be able to mail them ahead of time if I choose to. The playerbase has been desiring this for years and when it's finally here, everyone wants to grab a pitchfork. Ridiculous. This community is disgustingly toxic.

Speaking from and IT perspective. Just because one piece can do something does not mean all pieces can do something. Your statement suggests that this was available before but not implemented because they wanted to get more cash grab from realm transfers. That more than likely is not the case either code wise or hardware wise.

If they'd been able to introduce it a long time ago, why did they not just do it with realm coalescence? How much do you think they actually made from people transfering characters just for their heirlooms?

Now that Blizzard is making the heirlooms truly xrealms, is it not odd, that suddenly they have the tech to do it In-Game, via the mail tool?

Honestly, I think they could have done it for a LONG time, but it just has been too good source of income to them.

There are times when you have the technology, but it's not easy or pretty to implement and the chance for more problems to pop up. Sometimes, they could probably spend more time working on it, but there just isn't enough need to justify the time spent. Then later with various other upgrades and improvments, what was once a difficult task becomes fairly easy. Look at CGI rendering as an example, could you do it 20 years ago? yes, very expensive and time consuming. Now look it today, much cheaper and faster and you can do it at home.

They said for years that its a hardware limitation that prevents cross-server mailing. Because realms are being merged it does allow it without huge changes to hardware. I'd not expect this to be a stepping stone toward full cross-realm mailing because that limitation still exists and would take too much time to fix.